Prologue:
“CHANGE” is evident in technology start-ups to multinational companies since cloud computing has arrived and as stated by Gartner, nearly 20% of enterprises are using cloud computing most commonly for managing their workloads. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) growing almost 50% every year and it’s already a $6 billion market. The increasing popularity of IaaS shows that to a great extent more and more apps and services will be provided by the cloud by the group of ever-growing businesses, teams, developers, and system admins and database frameworks. Cloud Management Platforms are now delivering support to IaaS consumers to help manage their expanding portfolio of cloud applications.
Using cloud management portals, enterprises can install, manage, monitor, and control their applications across public and private clouds, making sure that they achieve both agility and cost savings.
We recommend, when you’re looking for the best cloud management platform, look for the following must-haves in it:
1. CMP must simplify complexity:
Flexibility is the main reason why IaaS has become such a huge hit among businesses. Consumers of IaaS can select instance sizes, operating systems, databases, frameworks for apps, and a list of other resources. IaaS consumers can edit particular cloud instances by changing configurations, boot sequences, and cron jobs. Along with these customizations, IaaS consumers need to face complexities that many of them try to escape by avoiding traditional data centers.
An efficient cloud management platform provides you with the necessary customization needed for an IaaS to be successful, including managing tool versioning, source control, and configuration management to control all of them.
2. CMP must support multiple cloud management:
Cloud users are looking for true interoperability i.e., an application built upon one platform can be run on another platform without any need to change the underlying code. Hence true interoperability is not limited only to simple cloud API compatibility, but it goes beyond that and supports cloud users in handling various behaviors among various cloud providers. As you all very well know, all VMs neither behave the same across clouds nor do storage volumes or snapshots. Hence, your cloud management portal should provide you with this multi-cloud support feature by allowing application interoperability across several IaaS cloud platforms.
3. CMP must be built for the future:
The IaaS market is growing fast and must have heard about weekly updates from Amazon, Rackspace, Apache CloudStack, and OpenStack and also from Azure and Google. In a year, IaaS users will receive more advanced services and world-class offerings from cloud vendors. A cloud management portal should support these innovations and also, support a broad range of IaaS cloud service providers offering both public and private cloud platforms.
4. CMP must support the application lifecycle:
There’s much more to managing applications than simply getting them launched. A typical application lifecycle involves a lot of things such as updating code, patching security vulnerabilities, capacity management, performance optimization, backup, failovers, etc., and much more. These tasks could be handled by several tools. A comprehensive cloud management portal offers monitoring, alerting, configuration management, auto-scaling, block storage, load-balancing, Kubernetes, etc., and various other tools required to take an application from the source code repository complete with reliable updates and uncertain service suspensions.
5. CMP must provide Automation: Create and Forget it:
For large enterprises, managing data and applications need a lot of repetitive tasks. Hence, rather than setting manual processes to manage every server or push code, the cloud instance created must automatically manage it. Ultimately, the infrastructure is handled with code through APIs.
A cloud management portal provides the best value with capacity management, support for integration, and resource planning that decreases operational costs and allows your team to maintain ever-increasing computing needs.
6. CMP must manage and control costs:
An IaaS platform makes it easy to utilize infrastructure, so much easier that you might be anxious that your business is utilizing so much more than you expected. Additionally, IaaS pricing is somewhat complex, on-demand, and continuously changing. It doesn’t go well with several IT departments and their long-term budgets. Hence, always look for a cloud management portal that offers cost forecasting, reporting, and chargebacks in order that users can hang on to their location when their cloud bills turn up.
Most of the companies, from small to large businesses, are incorporating cloud management platforms as a vital component of their cloud program.
With the above-mentioned must-haves at your disposal, you’ll be all set to manage your cloud applications across public cloud and private cloud platforms to exactly understand the cost savings and agility advantages of cloud computing.
Potential for a Cloud Management Portal (CMP):
1. Self-service Portal:
The Cloud Management Platform must support self-service cloud implementation and administration facilities.
2. Service Catalogues:
The Cloud Management Platform should present a catalog of target cloud environ services available to users. Users will have access to a defined set of services, or they can configure it as per their needs.
3. Resource Management:
Resource management is essential for CMP to provide the visibility of cloud resources and on-demand service delivery.
The following capabilities are needed to administer resources effectively:
- Maintain inventory on a regular basis and discover cloud resources for efficient resource management.
- For effective resource management, a CMP must be able to assign tags to the cloud instances.
- CMP must support cloud resource provisioning and de-provisioning.
- Automate cloud orchestration processes to manage resources.
- Support cloud migration involving workload shifting from private to public cloud.
4. Administration:
Public, private, and hybrid cloud platform services should be handled according to the policies of the organization. Administrational power in CMP allows an administrator to administer vital business processes and automatically complete the tasks using specific rules. It applies policy-based control over cloud resources.
5. Managing Finance:
The cloud management platform automates ratings, metering, billing of services, chargeback reports, consumer invoicing, and third-party settlement processes. Hence real-time analysis and reporting including analytics are necessary for cost management.
6. Security:
On a cloud management platform, security feature consists of encryption management – key and associated certification management – with role-based access control, user authentication, and authorization set against various identity providers.
7. Integration:
It’s an another important feature to look for in a cloud management portal. CMP must support billing systems, reporting, and monitoring systems, including support access to IT systems.
8. Dashboards and Reports:
Several cloud management portals offer dashboards that can help users monitor real-time resource consumption and also provide metrics, visibility, and control over performance, availability, and security.
Conclusion:
Interactive cloud analytics dashboards and holistic recommendations suggested above help to optimize the cost of the cloud.
Stack Console cloud management portal delivers all the above-mentioned must-have features and potential for CMP. If you want to know more about Stack Console , get in touch with us Today! Via email: [email protected].